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Wilmot Works It Out
Available now for PC and Mac!
Boy Are Our Arms Tired
Thanks for the fun, Gamescom and PAX West!
Wilmot's Warehouse is Now a Board Game!
A game about making up silly stories with your friends!
An Ode to Plushies
Our softest, most huggable, lovable friends.
Get TUNIC for Free on PS Plus!
Don't forget to check your manual.
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The first half of today’s two live runs on the GDC build. I… do pretty poorly haha. At least one of these game-overs is due to a bug though, I swear!!
The IGS Soapbox: Bekah’s 5 Minutes
My name is Rebekah Saltsman and I co-own Finji with Adam"Atomic" Saltsman. I don’t just run a company with Adam, I amalso his wife. I am up here today, after years of maintainingrelative invisibility in the industry, to talk to you about what is on
my mind. And there is a lot going on up here.
Standing up here, I could regale you with stories of our successes
and failures or our dramas- we’ve done a lot of stuff wrong, a lot of
stuff right. We have trusted the wrong people and the right ones.
But that is not what is on my mind today. Today I am going to tell
you a little about what it is like to run a company like Finji and
raise children.
I am a mom. I have two beautiful sons, Kingsley and Finnegan,
who have changed who I am. I am also the “default parent.”
Everyday, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, our boys come to me
first if a knee is skinned, a head is bonked, a night terror terrorizes.
I am the parent who takes them to swim and dance and gymnastics
and soccer. I monitor the doctor appointments, the preschool
progress, the growth charts, the health histories. Adam is always
there, maintaining a level of involvement with the boys unheard of
a generation ago, but it is my responsibility to make sure the kids
are on track day in and day out. Adam gets designated, reliable
work days while I take care of the boys.
I am also the CEO of Finji. I contribute to design, handle the
finances, legal, console partnerships, and monitor and co-mentor
our Partner Publishing projects. Steve Swink once called pre-kid
me the Indie Cub Scout mom- and that is never more true now that
I am actually a mom.
I want you to take a moment to think of all of the women you
know in game development. In general, they have it pretty hard.
The playing field is not level. As you are thinking of all of the
women in your network, do a quick head count on all of the them
that have kids in independent and AAA.
Up until last week I knew 2. Total. Over the course of 4 days and a
whole lotta retweets, about 21 moms who talked with me over
email and twitter, with kids ranging in ages from 3 months to 23
years old, came out of the woodwork. Only 2 of those 21 women
are at GDC this week. 3 including me.
We are a lonely club. Our closest compatriots are culled from
hometown freelancers, writers, and artists who also have children
and who almost understand what we do everyday. But none of
them are actually in gaming. When we work, at off hours when the
kids are asleep, standing in the kitchen checking email, making
phone calls and making dinner day in and day out- we snatch at
whatever time we can to chip away at our to-do list. We do this
mostly alone without the option to hang out online chatting with
other game developers.
Imagine you have a phone that is always answered and is only set
at the loudest level. You always have that phone with you. You can
attempt to ignore the person on the phone, but they will just keep
talking, louder and louder. Welcome to attempting to work with a
preschooler in the house.
One mom said this and it has stuck with me: “I should be able to
make my career decisions independent of whether I’m going to be
able to leave to pick up the kids or whether I’m avoiding crunch
time.“
Every decision we make, our career decisions, our relationships,
EVERYTHING must be framed in the impact on the family.
So, how are we doing emotionally as women working in
independent game development?
We are hanging in there. We are attempting to create a new way to
do things for the women to come after us. We are dealing with the
same prejudices in the industry against women that are present in
tech and AAA but we are doing it alone, from the relative comfort
of our home. We were unprepared for the task of juggling children
and work and our collective motto seems to be "just make it work.”
But while we are making it work, and good heavens are we making
it work, even with what seems like a million things preventing us
from working in this industry. Our most important currency, our
time, is rationed by the constraints that being a mom and default
parent have put on us.
But let me assure you, we are so much more. We are better and
way more badass than we ever were before creating actual
human life and raising those humans from birth to adulthood.
We are different. Not alien. We love games- making games,
playing games and teaching our children about all the amazing
things created every single day in our industry. We are here and
even though you may never meet us because we will never get out
at night or away to things like GDC, we are a part of this industry,
we love it, and we aren’t going anywhere.
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We are super proud to announce that our original educational game PHOENIX Protocol is available now on the Amplify Network! BACKGROUND: We were in talks with Amplify about doing some commissioned educational game production for years, but it wasn’t until last year that the stars aligned and our schedule started to work. This was a really fun and interesting project and I hope we get to do more like it in the future. Years of contracting have made me very picky about clients, and Amplify were A+ amazing to work with. ABOUT THE GAME: Players solve a series of increasingly difficult binary math puzzles in order to bring their drifting spaceship back online and get home. It’s got 3D characters, 56 puzzles, a full script, more juice than you can shake a tween at, and a slick soundtrack by Towerfall composer and repeat collaborator Alec Holowka (Portico, Night In The Woods). Alec also you know programmed the entire game and made all the sound effects. Press kit available here.
Finji Projects at GDC
We haven’t been slacking over at Finji these last several weeks. We are almost at the end of our first big crunch period in preparation for GDC. It is going to be quite a week for us and our projects. If you are on your way to GDC, here is your invite to come check out some projects you may have heard of (and those you haven’t) and meet Bekah and Adam along with the Night in the Woods, Overland and Panoramical Teams! 
Adam and I have several slots on the GDC speaking schedule and we invite you to come out and listen to us and the awesome people with which we get to share panels and workshops! Adam is talking all things Portico in the Failure Workshop. Portico began life as a reverse-Indiana-Jones jam game (you play as the temple) in 2011 before passing through 4 or 5 distinct and major iterations. We’re going to thoroughly explore them all in about 15 minutes. Adam will talk about where the game started, where it went, why it was killed and how in the world did it get resurrected months later. Come out to the IGS on Tuesday, March 3rd from 11:15am to 12:15pm in Room 2005 (West Hall) I (Bekah) was invited to be one of the 10 speakers during this year’s IGS Soapbox. It is my first speaking opportunity at GDC and I am honored to be sharing it with the 9 people who are also soapboxing. Get to Room 2005 (West Hall) early because the Soapbox Session is standing room only every single year. And once you see the other game developers on the schedule for this, well, it will be packed. The session closes out the IGS on Tuesday, March 3rd from 4:30pm to 5:30pm. Adam will be participating in a panel discussion about indie publishing called Indie Publishing - A Whole New World with Greg Rice of Double Fine Productions, Kellee Santiago of Ouya, and Mike Wilson, of Devolver Digital and fellow Austinite. These four will talk about the new landscape of indie publishing and how this might or might not affect you, the indie developer. We are excited to tell people about how we run things here at Finji with our awesome partner projects like Night in the Woods and Panoramical. So come out to the panel during the main GDC Conference on Wednesday, March 4 from 3:30pm to 4:30pm in Room 2001 (West Hall).
You Want to Play our Games and Hear About IN-DEVELOPMENT Projects? MILD RUMPUS
Night in the Woods will be exhibited at Mild Rumpus on Monday and Tuesday. Our 15 minute demo, which has delighted players since last year, will be playable for GDC Attendees. Also, in attendance, will be the 3 main creatives behind the project! So come out, play, and meet up with Alec Holowka, Scott Benson, and Bethany Hockenberry. Tell them how amazing they are because they do not hear it enough. Night in the Woods is absolutely worth your time during your busy GDC week. Our new internal development project, Overland, will be making it’s public debut on Wednesday and Thursday at Mild Rumpus. Overland is Finji’s newest collaboration and the team has been putting in a lot of extra hours to make sure it is ready for your eyes AND ears on Wednesday. Come out and play our most recent build and get excited for it’s release later this year. Experience a roadtrip to somewhere across the US with an ever changing collection of travelers along the way. Where are you going? WEST. Meet the 5 core team members of Overland throughout Mild Rumpus- Adam Saltsman, Rebekah Saltsman, Shay Pierce, Heather Penn, and Jocelyn Reyes. Want even MORE information on Overland? Adam and team will be presenting the game at Mild Rumpus at 5:00PM on Thursday, March 5th. This is the first public talk about this game, you don’t want to miss it!
Hey. I’m Press and I Want to See Your Stuff at Press Only Events!
We have two of our projects, Overland and Panoramical, at The MIX at the IGN offices tonight, Monday, March 1. Come talk to Overland co-designer, Shay Pierce, and art director, Heather Penn, and David Kanaga, co-creator, of Panoramical at the Finji booth. We will be there from 7pm to close and want to show you our games.
Hey, I am BOOKED UP, but I Need to See this Stuff!
Adam and I can be reached at hello@finji.co and you can find our office press kit here. We will both be around GDC and would love to meet you. You can follow us on twitter at: Adam: @Adamatomic Bekah: @BexSaltsman Finji: @FinjiCo
See You Soon!!
gdc is a lot closer than we want it to be still
GDC is a lot closer than we want it to be still, but we are making some pretty fast progress the last few days….